The present invention relates to elastic elements useful for constructing various types of shock-absorbing devices. The invention is particularly useful for constructing non-pneumatic vehicle tires and is therefore described below with respect to this application, but it will be appreciated from the description below that the invention is also useful for constructing other types of shock-absorbing devices, such as seismic shock absorbers for building structures, mechanical shock absorbers for machines, and the like.
Conventional vehicle tires of the pneumatic type suffer from a number of disadvantages, including the need to maintain a predetermined air pressure within the tire for optimum performance, and the danger of a catastrophic failure in the event of a leak or blowout, which could result in a serious accident. While conventional non-pneumatic tires are not subject to these disadvantages, they are much heavier than pneumatic tires, and provide considerably less shock absorption than pneumatic tires. Previous attempts have been made to produce non-pneumatic tires with elastomeric inserts in order to provide the foregoing advantageous characteristic of pneumatic tires, but insofar as we are aware, no such non-pneumatic tires have yet gained any widespread use.